he could well understand since the shaft probably connected with the core of volcanic matter somewhere. That core must be a long way off, though, for here in Britain volcanic areas just did not exist—
Then the brawny, sweating men were coming up the slope in the hot afternoon sunlight bearing with them the ropes, trestles, and block and tackle necessary for a descent into the depths. In a very short time they had a cable and harness rigged up, and Cliff made himself comfortable within it.
“Lower away,” he instructed, switching on his torch. “I’ll give the usual signal when I want to come back.”
The field engineer himself took charge of operations, and gradually Cliff found himself descending from the burning sunlight into the warm, dark depths, the draught blowing up past him as he went down. Just at this point the shaft was not very wide; so that his torch beam easily reached the walls on either side. From the appearance of the rock it was plain that the shaft was Nature’s handiwork: the explosion had not unexpectedly revealed some earthwork performed by men in the dim past.
The narrow width of the shaft persisted for nearly two hundred feet, then it suddenly branched away, and Cliff found himself swinging in a great abyss from which all signs of walls had gone. His torch beam completely failed to reach them. Up above there was a pinprick of bright light that marked the spot where the hole opened to the surface.
“Everything all, right, Mr. Brooks?” came the field engineer’s voice over Cliff’s tiny portable radio.
“Okay so far. Keep on lowering me. First time I ever saw a shaft like this. It’s opened now into a big cavern—or something. I’m right in empty air at the moment and it’s getting colder instead of warmer.”
This was a fact. The warm air was apparently escaping into the narrow part of the shaft, possibly from unseen blowholes in the rocks that connected deeply with the Earth’s faraway volcanic depths. Here, in the more open region, the warmth had gone and a glacial coldness was descending. Cliff gave a little shiver as perspiration chilled upon him.
Then suddenly he saw ground coming up to meet him in the torch beam. He landed on his feet without hurt, and gave the “Stay put” pull on the guide rope as he detached himself from the harness. Torch in hand he looked about him, conscious of the intense, sepulchral cold.
He was certainly in some kind of underground cave, great daggers of limestone rock pointing down at him from high above, except from the black hole through which he had come. Then there was that mysterious rumbling note. He could still hear it, much more forcibly now, but it still seemed be coming from below. Drawn on by the fascinating mystery of the whole thing he explored farther, doing his best to disregard the intense cold.
Just in time he stopped himself as he came to the edge of a sheer cliff. Amazed, he stared over it into incomprehensible depths. It seemed incredible that there could be a gorge so vast in the Earth itself. It went into absolute remoteness, but at a colossal distance below there seemed to be something vaguely white. It had a curious phosphorescent quality, for, though he tried to the limit, he could not bring his eyes to focus on this unimaginably faraway phenomenon.
“Okay?” rang out the friendly voice of the field engineer.
“Yes, but frozen stiff. I’m looking at something I don’t understand, some kind of gorge that looks as though it opens into the very core of the Earth itself. That can’t be right, though, else there’d be steam and hellfire coming up. I can see a long slope going down into infinity— Just a moment whilst I try an age-old experiment.”
Turning, Cliff picked up a reasonably heavy boulder, whitish with a glaze of frost. He heaved it into the canyon and then counted the seconds until there should come the sound of the stone arriving, whereby to roughly estimate the distance in feet. But there was no answering sound. As far as he knew the stone never hit bottom, or else the noise of it doing so was lost. The buried, mystic rumbling remained unchanged.
“Deeper than anything man ever encountered before,” he announced into the microphone. “Have to take a proper look at it later—”
He stopped speaking abruptly, his eye catching sight for the first time of a mighty glacier wall to the rear of him. It looked exactly like green glass. This in itself was remarkable enough, testifying to the extreme cold at this particular region in contrast with the warmth of the higher levels—but even more remarkable was the sight of something white and oval very near the outer surface of the glacier wall. Cliff began moving towards it.
“You all right?” came an anxious enquiry. “You stopped talking very suddenly.”
“I’m all right, yes: just looking at something odd.”
Cliff ran his fingers over the iron hard smoothness of the glacier wall’s face, his torch beam fixed on the oval something. It was shaped rather like an egg. It was an egg!
“I’ll be damned,” Cliff muttered; then into the microphone: “Send down a pickaxe, please, right away. I’ve happened on to the biggest egg I ever saw. May be interesting to find out what laid it.”
There was an interval whilst the pickaxe was sent down, then Cliff went to work, carefully nicking the ice away in a big circle from around the mystery object. It took him half an hour to get it free, so scared was he of breaking it. Then he laid it down in its bed of chipped ice and peered at it again in the torchlight. It measured some eighteen inches from tip to tip, and possibly nine inches across. In colour it was muddy brown-white, but appeared to be in perfect condition thanks to the ice that had preserved it.
“I’m coming up again,” he announced, carefully packing the huge egg into the haversack of small tools and odds and ends he had brought with him. “Raise me as carefully as you can.”
He held the egg carefully against him as he was lifted up the shaft once more, and by the time he had reached the top the ice around the egg had completely melted, soaking the haversack and his shirt.
“What the blazes laid a thing like that?” the field engineer asked in amazement as Cliff came out of the harness and held the egg up proudly.
“No idea, but I mean to find out by the simple process of hatching it. May have been down there in the ice for centuries.”
“Any idea why there should be ice down there?” the field engineer asked.
“No idea at all, unless it’s some kind of drift from an underground glacial region, which is quite possible. Take an expert geologist to work that one out.” Cliff’s expression changed slowly as he stood thinking. “Something very queer down there, boys,” he continued. “Warm volcanic draughts, ice cold mass of glacier in which I found this, and a gorge of inconceivable depth going down into— Well I just don’t know what.”
“The answer to all this being what?” the field engineer asked. “Can this region be passed as okay for building?”
Cliff shook his head. “Not yet. For one thing this narrow shaft will have to be thoroughly examined in case there’s a chance of a subsidence later into that big cavern I landed in. This whole area’s in considerable danger of lunging inwards at some future date. I’m taking no responsibility. If the geologists issue a certificate, then that passes the buck to them. Right now there’s nothing more we can do but get this rubbish shovelled up. You look after it, Dick, and I’ll go into town and report to headquarters.”
“Okay,” the field engineer promised, and Cliff went on his way still carrying the mystery egg with infinite care. When he arrived home that evening he still had it with him, but by now it was in a cardboard box lined with cotton wool. With a certain air of mystery, like a magician about to perform a trick, he displayed the egg to his wife.
“What is it?” Joan asked, not particularly pleased at having the untidy old box dumped on the spotlessly white tablecloth.
“An egg,” Cliff said proudly. “The biggest egg you ever saw!”
“I can tell that. What laid it, an ostrich?”
“Heavens, no! An ostrich’s egg would be